Niall Ferguson compared the game of chicken playing out between Athens and Greece to the Cuban Missile Crisis.

If the story of Spanish banks sounds familiar, perhaps you remember Ireland?

Moody's downgraded five Dutch banks.

Blame game: Facebook is preparing to file a motion in U.S. District Court that would consolidate all lawsuits arising from the company's disappointing initial public offering, The New York Times reports. The motion, which could be filed as soon as today, is expected to lay some blame on Nasdaq for the lost shareholder value in the days after the IPO.

Quants gain: May was a good month for black-box hedge funds, Reuters reports. The BarclayHedge index of commodity trading advisers, or CTAs, as the funds are sometimes called, gained 2.6 percent last month. The BarclayHedge hedge fund index fell 2.8 percent.

Bank bears: Investors increased their bets that bank stocks would fall by 9 percent in the second half of may against the previous two weeks, the largest increase over a two-week period since 2009. Short interest in Bank of America and Citigroup jumped 75 percent and 61 percent respectively, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Repaid: The Federal Reserve Bank of New York said it has been paid in full—$53.12 billion for loans plus interest—the funds used to support government bailouts of AIG and Bear Stearns.

Dalio's world: Want to know your favorite trader's batting average on tech stocks? Baseball cards are in at Bridgewater Associates.

Bank sues Schilling: Citizens Bank is suing to recover $2.4 million in loans made to former Red Sox star Curt Schilling, whose video game company 38 Studios filed Chapter 7 this week.

It was only this weekend, of course, that a plan to rescue the Spanish banking system with $125 billion in European funds, news that soothed investors for about five minutes before markets turned back again Spain's government bonds.

With the possibility that the Greek elections Sunday could install the anti-bailout Syriza party in control of the government, a G20 official told Reuters that "the central banks are preparing for coordinated action to provide liquidity":

Wall Street stocks jumped sharply on the news, with the S&P 500 and the Dow Industrials both up more than 1 percent. The euro added to gains and U.S. government debt prices fell, boosting yields.

Separately on Thursday, British finance minister George Osborne said the government and the Bank of England will act together with new monetary policy tools to tackle tightening credit and financial market conditions triggered by the euro zone crisis.

Not that said actions would likely be the last, Reuters points out:

A senior U.S. official cautioned that the Greek election will not provide "the definitive signal on what happens next" in the euro zone debt crisis."

The New York Times reports:

"I kind of feel like I'm living in parallel universes," Mr. Pandit said in a forum that included Peter Sands of Standard Chartered Bank and Stephen A. Schwarzman of the Blackstone Group. "I'm here in Korea and I feel this warmth and need and the sense of trying to have a dialogue with each other, but then when I get back to my real universe, it's cold in that universe."

By ProPublica's count, Citigroup has since 2008 been the recipient of $280 billion in U.S. government handouts. The Treasury Department has not yet finished selling off what had once been a 27 percent position in the company. So yeah, we could see how a Citi CEO might feel a little like he's getting the cold shoulder in the States.

mtaylor [at] observer.com | @mbrookstaylor

• One way to sidestep the new "Volcker rule" that seeks to ban proprietary trading: Call it proprietary investing. [FT]
• Not so fast, insurers and trade clearinghouses: You, too, are under consideration for stricter capital requirements because, like other financial firms, some of you are too big to fail. [Bloomberg]
• The Panic of 2008 did not purge the financial system of all the bad assets that hobbled some of America's biggest firms. The assets are still gathering dust on assorted comanies' balance sheets, waiting for opportunistic hedge funds and private equity firms to snap them up at bargain-basement prices. [NYT]
• The G20 group of economic powerhouses is close to an accord on foreign exchange rates and trade imbalances, but the dual specters of protectionism and emerging-economy resentment continue to haunt the proceedings. [WSJ]
• Despite these tough economic times, companies are very excited about selling insurance to rich people. [Reuters]

mtaylor [at] observer.com | @mbrookstaylor

• Soybeans, copper, you name it. If it's an interchangeable article of commerce, it's price has been rocketing higher lately, partly thanks to demand in China and emerging economies and partly because the Federal Reserve is printing money like it was going out of style. [WSJ]
• In addition to an unemployment rate that remains stagnant, uncertainty over whether monetary intervention will help the U.S. economy return to growth and a foreclosure crisis that threatens to hamper the financial system, an overlooked threat to commerce looms: America's stores are shrinking before our very eyes! [NYT]
• Representatives from the G20 group of the world's economic powers -- which still includes, believe it or not, the United States -- are meeting in Seoul to try to patch up any hard feelings generated by what some see as America's flagrant debasing of its own currency. [AP]
• Foreign countries aren't the only ones crying about quantitative easing. [FT]
• Wall Street has blown up governments and nonprofit organizations to the tune of $4 billion over the past decade by selling credit derivatives called "interest rate swaps." [Bloomberg]

mtaylor [at] observer.com | @mbrookstaylor